Instruments

It has again been some time since the last Saleroom report, and the reasons are mainly the same as before: a paucity of interesting sales to report. Even the recent Sotheby's annual Early Instruments sale had less of real quality than in some previous years, though a rather greater quantity than last year.

A further discouragement has been the change of commencement time for the regular quarterly sales at Gardiner Houlgate. They now start to sell at 11 am which makes it very difficult to view on the day of the sale. Faced with the choice of viewing the day before plus the cost of a hotel, or of driving to Corsham two days running, there needs to be a strong quantity of potentially interesting material to make it worth going at all, and this has been lacking. There was a fair amount of woodwind from Rex Montgomery's collection in the two sales on 2 April and 25 June, but word had gone round that these were the leftovers after all the better material had been sold elsewhere and that much of the boxwood was in poor condition—cracked bodies, enlarged embouchures, missing or broken keys and ferrules, damaged tenons, and so forth—and that the later rosewood instruments were in similar state. Colleagues have told me that there were one or two interesting items, nevertheless, but that on the whole these reports were confirmed. For those within easier reach of Corsham, or with the time to make the double journey, the Gardiner Houlgate sales are always worth keeping an eye on, for unlike the London houses, they are not rigidly constrained by the financial controllers over what they will accept for sale. Rumour has it that Sotheby's, for example, are now not supposed to accept items which are likely to sell for less than £700 and this, even if rumour has exaggerated the minimum probable price, has the double effect of them turning away many interesting but minor lots and of leading to the disastrous over-estimating that we shall see below. Such items will continue to appear at Corsham, which will become more and more the venue of choice for both vendors and collectors of the less-important instruments which interest so many of us and which formed the nucleus of many well-known collections. The days of ivory recorders for half-a-crown on barrows in markets or flutes for thirty shillings (reminiscences of James MacGillivray and Reginald Morley-Pegge to me many years ago) are long gone, but there are still many quite adequate instruments going for three or four hundred pounds or even less.

Gardiner Houlgate do also have occasional sales in London, but these are for the better-class members of the violin family, and although, of course, many originate from our periods of interest, none—save for a couple of bows and a dislocated cello neck with a leonine scroll on 29 March—has been observed as yet to be in original condition. Whether this will change, remains to be seen.

Much the same applies to the internet sales of Tarisio. These, as we have observed before, are as it were a conflation between the styles of eBay and of the conventional auction houses. Sales are in timed slots over the internet, but instruments are displayed for view in the normal way in both Boston and New York, and a proper printed catalogue is produced, as well as being placed on their web site; Tarisio are a proper auction house rather than a channel for private vendors. Modern viols have appeared, a treble in May and a bass by Boulangeot in October, which sold for $2,645. That sale also included some kits and a late pochette, each of which sold for $1,840 , an early 19 th-century Dodd violin bow at $3,162.50 , and an unusual Erard double-action harp with a head volute reminiscent of earlier makers such as Nadermann and Cousineau, so much so that one wondered whether it might have been a rebuild. Others may also have been puzzled by it for it did not sell. In the...